Commenting on Global Politics, items of concern to Marcus Aurelius, and everything in between!

Thursday, March 03, 2005

Avon Ladies or Generals. WOT Warriors.

Yesterday I was doing some search engine investigation on just looking at the blogs around about here in Appleton. I found a blog by a certain individual and went to it. It did not appear to be very political (and in general it isn't) but there was one blog that caught my eye.

The title is Nate's Blog: A general, no less. The blog itself asked if this (this being USMC General Mattis who stated he enjoyed killing bad guys) would have happened under Clinton or under a president Kerry. Reading further it was about the general who said he enjoyed his work very thoroughly. Nate & his readers thought it terrible a general might enjoy his work. So I commented:Nope not at all. After all John Kerry did promise a more sensitive war on terror. He probably would have sent Oprah Winfrey to hold group sessions with the Taliban.

There-there Mullah Omar, give me a hug. I know you are sorry for crushing those homosexuals under walls. I know you are sorry for executing those women for sneaking out of their home to see a doctor.

That is the ticket!

This brought a response the most focused portion of which was: "You're right, Omar and others that commited [sic] those deeds are horrible people. But you're suggesting that its better to have this general saying "Actually it's quite fun to fight 'em, you know. It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up front with you, I like brawling.... So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. " rather than to have Kerry as president and maybe someone else searching for them who would (hopefully) not think of anything so terrible...If people like this general are who you're choosing to defend or align yourself with, then I'm not gonna change your mind.

The point of the post was not to say Mullah Omar and his band of buddies are bad, it is obvious (Nate agrees). The point was to say there is little alternative to dealing with these people. Would the general in question have acted similarly under Clinton or Kerry. Of course he would have! After all General Mattis did not just join the USMC and rise to the rank of general during the Bush Presidency.

Nate gets really worked up and covers a whole list of standard leftist bullet points (Bush is dumb, Bush & Rumsfeld are directly responsible for torture etc etc etc). The essential point of the discussion is he finds it distasteful we have warriors in our military. While I do not believe it would be good to have General Mattis too close to policy makers General Mattis is just the sort of field general we need.